The Touch of Death (or Death-Point Striking) refers to any martial arts technique reputed to kill using seemingly less than lethal force targeted at specific areas of the body.
The concept known as Dim Mak (simplified Chinese: 点脉; traditional Chinese: 點脈; pinyin: diǎnmài; literally "press artery"; Jyutping: dim2 mak6), alternatively diǎnxué (simplified Chinese: 点穴; traditional Chinese: 點穴) traces its history to traditional Chinese medicine acupuncture. Tales of its use are often found in the Wuxia genre of Chinese martial arts fiction. Dim Mak is depicted as a secret body of knowledge with techniques that attack pressure points and meridians, said to incapacitate or sometimes cause immediate or even delayed death to an opponent. There is no scientific or historical evidence for the existence of a touch of death.
The concept known as Vibrating Palm originates with the Chinese martial arts Neijing ("internal") energy techniques that deal with the Qi energy and the type of force (jin) used. It is depicted as "a technique that is part psychic and part vibratory, this energy is then focused into a wave". According to a United States National Institutes of Health consensus statement in 1997, concepts such as qi "are difficult to reconcile with contemporary biomedical information."
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Famous quotes containing the words touch of, touch and/or death:
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—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
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Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
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—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I’m beginning to believe that Killer Illiteracy ought to rank near heart disease and cancer as one of the leading causes of death among Americans. What you don’t know can indeed hurt you, and so those who can neither read nor write lead miserable lives, like Richard Wright’s character, Bigger Thomas, born dead with no past or future.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)